Thursday, June 20, 2002

Orientalism and Occidentalism: Arab states, Islamism and the West

There's a transcript of an interesting lecture given by Gema Martín-Muñoz, a sociology professor at Autonoma University of Madrid, at Open Democracy. She begins,

In pointing to the undeniably negative aspects of Arab and Muslim societies, a simplistic Western view explains them away as the ‘inevitable’ consequences of Islamic determinism. It insists on linking lack of democracy to the Islamic character of these peoples, the inequality between men and women to the imposition of Islam, the violence to ‘Islamic fanatics’.

In the West, this has led to the resurgence of a historic memory of Muslim cultural and religious opposition; while, on the other hand, Muslim historical memory vis-à-vis the West is also stirred into renewed life. These memories have profoundly political roots – they are the result of a long and intensive Western (European, US, Soviet) presence in this part of the world, involving a huge range of experiences: colonisation; artificial division into nation states; the creation of Israel; double standards regarding democracy and human rights; contempt for the massive suffering of civilian people, from Kurds to Palestinians, Iraqis to Afghans.
The first paragraph essentially summarizes, albeit at a superficial level, Edward Said's thesis on orientalism. Thus, we continue to put "Islam" and "the East" on this chopping block of criticism that exposes the West's own ignorance more than the supposed deficiencies of "their culture". September 11, if anything, animated this discourse to heights not previously seen since, probably, the end of imperial ventures in the late 19th century. How, then, can anyone claim that the orientalist critique has reached an end? I just don't get it; while many people showed a sense of restraint in saying that we shouldn't set out for war against Islam (as if that should be applauded; shouldn't it be the logical expectation?), the continued exploration of Islamic society has been underlined by Bernard Lewis' loaded question of "what went wrong?" This tendency to compress hundreds of years of Islamic history into a caricature to provide information on the East solely for the West's benefit - and not to contextualize it for an honest understanding - is precisely what Said was critiquing.

Have you not seen Bill Maher quoting from the Koran on P.I.? Have you not seen the myriad of books in Barnes and Noble that suddenly quench an American thirst that, by gosh, we need to understand "those people"? These are anecdotes, for sure, but they seem to point to an underlying desire to consume knowledge for explicitly utilitarian purposes that reveal a selfish and culturally biased way of trying to grapple with what's going on beyond our borders. They also, at times, stoke the fire of animosity in accord with Huntington's clash of civilizations paradigm.

To be fair, the West does not have a monopoly on this technique, as evinced by the East's own Occidentalism.